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William deBuys, The Border Wall Thrives, The Borderlands Don’t

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Here’s a question for you: in addition to wiping out the East Wing of the White House to build his future ballroom and so much more, including the construction of a major triumphal arch in Washington (that will be wildly larger than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris), might Donald Trump consider building a wall around the White House to keep the president of the United States safe from migrants — as well as anyone else who might ever want to remove him from office (even after election 2028)?

That thought, I must admit, crossed my mind as I read the striking piece that TomDispatch regular William deBuys has written on the vast wall that “our” president has been plowing through the wildlands along the U.S.-Mexican border. He is indeed the border-wall president. But as it happens, he’s also been responsible for ensuring that ever fewer legal immigrants (like my own grandfather in the previous century) will be allowed into this country. In fact, asylum seekers legally entering the United States at that border fell in the second Trump term by 99.9% (from 40,000 as Joe Biden’s presidency ended to just 26 in February 2025). These days, in fact, if you don’t happen to be a White South African, forget about it. Of the 4,499 refugees who have arrived here since October 2025, only three weren’t from South Africa and White. Imagine that!

As Eve Fairbanks wrote at the Guardian, President Trump “tweeted about the victimization of white South Africans during his first term, but in his second term, Trump issued an unprecedented executive order targeting the country. It cut US foreign assistance and made a startling exception to his general antipathy to immigrants by offering expedited refugee status to Afrikaners, the Dutch-descended white group that helped build the apartheid regime.”

And with that in mind, let deBuys take you to our borderlands in person to see what Trump’s America looks like if you don’t happen to be a White Trump supporter from South Africa. Tom

The Never-ending Nightmare of the Border Wall

Flooded with Cash, Drained of Sense in Trump’s America

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A leading preoccupation of the first Trump administration has all but slipped from view. Except when ostensible conservatives speak out against it, the major media have scarcely breathed a word on the subject. But it's still there, 30 feet tall, aspirationally 1,952 miles long, obliterating habitats, dividing families, and sucking down public funds faster than a carrier-based air squadron.

The media’s lack of attention is understandable. All-too-real wars of choice and metaphorical wars against science, universities, and the environment have dominated our airtime and the headlines. The rise of a new medievalism in medicine and the abrogation of international trade and security agreements have also won attention. Add to all of that a federal paramilitary kidnapping people, even from what still passes for the halls of justice, while murdering the occasional protester, and one’s journalistic cup runneth over.

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Andrea Mazzarino, The Trauma and the Terror Among Us

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Yes, how truly (truly!) strange. I must admit that when President George W. Bush announced the launching of what he all too bluntly came to call “the Global War on Terror,” or GWOT, in response to (and within days of) the September 11, 2001, plane hijackings and attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists, I never imagined it would prove anything faintly as global as it became, or that it might come home in quite the fashion it has, ICE and all; nor would I have believed then that the American government would end up running what Rebecca Gordon recently labeled “concentration camps” across this country that would be filled with a striking new enemy, the immigrant.

But as a start, remember just how eerily strange it was that the president of the United States would actually go to war — first in Afghanistan (for 20 years) and then in Iraq (for eight years) — and that’s just to start down a list of countries where the U.S. has fought and, from Iran to Somalia, now continues to fight endlessly in response to those acts of terror. Imagine the pleasure those 19 dead terrorists would now feel if they knew just how much chaos they had truly caused with their brief but devastating assaults.

As it happens, the very first article for this site from today’s author, TomDispatch regular Andrea Mazzarino, was “Bearing Witness to the Costs of War.” She was, of course, one of the founders of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, and she’s vividly continued to follow this country’s endless wars since 2019 at TomDispatch. Today, she explores how the Global War on Terror, in its own strange fashion, did indeed come home to roost in the form of ICE, which, in the era of President Donald J. Trump, has already shot a number of people to death in this very country.

Yes, and imagine that, in the wake (an all-too-appropriate word) of 9/11, war would, after a fashion, become us. Tom

The Global War on Terror’s Journey Home

The Collective Trauma of America’s Twenty-First Century Wars

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America’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been receiving lots of scrutiny right now from journalists and ordinary citizens like me -- and for good reason! Detaining people en route to their kids’ schools, in hospitals, or at work shouldn't be the first thing that comes to mind these days when I think of “freedom,” “civil rights,” or “America.” Nor should spending tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to rebuild warehouses so that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, can hold people without charges in subhuman conditions. What do you think?

In all of this mayhem, it’s easy to overlook new human rights violations because there are so many each day. Violations of the rule of law have become the air Americans breathe.

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William D. Hartung, Shutting Down the War Machine

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Consider the change remarkable in its own fashion. The “President of PEACE” in his first term in office has distinctly become the President of WAR the second time around, whether in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean, in Venezuela, in Nigeria, in Somalia, or now in Iran. And it was indeed true that, though in his first term he took ludicrous credit for bringing peace to the planet by stopping wars that he generally didn’t halt, Donald Trump did not launch any significant wars himself. The second time around, however, the Peace President of increasingly “Epic Fury” simply can’t seem to stop doing so.  And he’s been using language in the process that no American president has ever publicly used before. As he posted on Truth Social recently about his plans for Iran (no matter that purposely targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime): “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

Yep, and with that “Fuckin’ Strait” (the Strait of Hormuz, of course), he’s piling presidential firsts one on top of another, even as, in a big-time fashion, he joins all the previous American presidents since World War II who have launched or been involved in staggeringly unsuccessful wars from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq. (Mind you, when it comes to Donald J. Trump and crew, “Fuckin’ Crooked” would be a significantly more accurate phrase.) Explain it as you will, in his second term as president, he has indeed been in a mood of — to steal his code name for his war on Iran — epic fury and seemingly all too ready to take the world that refused to give him a Nobel Prize down with him.

So, there should be little surprise that, this time around, the President of Peace is also remarkably eager to raise an already astronomical Pentagon budget by a mere $500 billion more dollars to a genuinely unprecedented $1.5 trillion and, if that doesn’t get him a Nobel Prize, maybe he’ll have to try raising it to two trillion dollars while cutting every civilian program in sight (as he’s already beginning to try to do).  Now, with all of that in mind, take a deep breath and let TomDispatch regular William Hartung, co-author of The Trillion Dollar War Machine (though, of course, any future edition may have to be retitled The Trillion and a Half Dollar War Machine), escort you into the Trumpian version of the military-industrial complex. (If President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who gave the MIC its name in his farewell address in 1961, could be brought back today, he simply wouldn’t believe his eyes!) Tom

Reining in the Pentagon

Can the Military-Industrial Beast Be Tamed?

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Right at this moment, we are witnessing an unprecedented shift of resources from domestic investments in the United States to the military-industrial complex (aka the war machine). The only comparable period in our history was the buildup to World War II, when the United States confronted a powerful adversary in Nazi Germany with designs to control not just Europe, but the world. The current buildup is breathtaking in scope and will certainly prove devastating in its impact -- not just on this country's foreign and domestic policies but also on the economic prospects of average Americans.

When, in 2023, my colleague Ben Freeman and I first conceived of our book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine, we viewed it in part as a cautionary tale about just how high the Pentagon budget might rise in the years to come (absent pushback from Congress and the taxpaying public). By the time our book came out in November 2025, however, the Pentagon budget had already topped the $1 trillion mark and, only recently, President Trump has proposed to instantly add another $500 billion to that already staggering figure and to do so in a single year’s time. And imagine this: such a proposed increase alone is higher than the total military budget of any other nation on Earth. Mind you, the current high levels of spending have already underwritten a provocative, unnecessary intervention in Venezuela and a region-wide war in the Middle East, and the larger costs of all this in human lives and damage to the global economy are guaranteed to shape the lives of the rest of us globally for years to come.

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